42 Facts About Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools.

Matthew Arnold was the son of Thomas Arnold, the celebrated headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator.

Matthew Arnold has been characterised as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues.

Matthew Arnold was an inspector of schools for thirty-five years, and supported the concept of state-regulated secondary education.

Matthew Arnold was the eldest son of Thomas Arnold and his wife Mary Penrose Arnold, born on 24 December 1822 at Laleham-on-Thames, Middlesex.

In 1828, Thomas Arnold was appointed Headmaster of Rugby School, where the family took up residence, that year.

From 1831, Matthew Arnold was tutored by his clerical uncle, John Buckland, in Laleham.

In 1836, Matthew Arnold was sent to Winchester College, but in 1837 he returned to Rugby School.

Matthew Arnold moved to the sixth form in 1838 and so came under the direct tutelage of his father.

Matthew Arnold wrote verse for a family magazine, and won school prizes.

Matthew Arnold attended John Henry Newman's sermons at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin but did not join the Oxford Movement.

Matthew Arnold graduated in the following year with second class honours in Literae Humaniores.

In 1845, after a short interlude of teaching at Rugby, Matthew Arnold was elected Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford.

In 1850 Wordsworth died; Matthew Arnold published his "Memorial Verses" on the older poet in Fraser's Magazine.

Matthew Arnold spent many dreary hours during the 1850s in railway waiting-rooms and small-town hotels, and longer hours still in listening to children reciting their lessons and parents reciting their grievances.

In 1852, Matthew Arnold published his second volume of poems, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems.

Matthew Arnold was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857, and he was the first in this position to deliver his lectures in English rather than in Latin.

Matthew Arnold self-published The Popular Education of France, the introduction to which was later published under the title Democracy.

In 1883 and 1884, Matthew Arnold toured the United States and Canada delivering lectures on education, democracy and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Matthew Arnold was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1883.

Matthew Arnold died suddenly in 1888 of heart failure whilst running to meet a tram that would have taken him to the Liverpool Landing Stage to see his daughter, who was visiting from the United States where she had moved after marrying an American.

Matthew Arnold was survived by his wife, who died in June 1901.

Matthew Arnold was a familiar figure at the Athenaeum Club, a frequent diner-out and guest at great country houses, charming, fond of fishing, and a lively conversationalist, with a self-consciously cultivated air combining foppishness and Olympian grandeur.

Matthew Arnold read constantly, widely, and deeply, and in the intervals of supporting himself and his family by the quiet drudgery of school inspecting, filled notebook after notebook with meditations of an almost monastic tone.

Matthew Arnold is sometimes called the third great Victorian poet, along with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Browning.

Matthew Arnold's poetry continues to have scholarly attention lavished upon it, in part because it seems to furnish such striking evidence for several central aspects of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, especially the corrosion of 'Faith' by 'Doubt'.

Matthew Arnold is, at his best, a very good but highly derivative poet.

Matthew Arnold derived the subject matter of his narrative poems from traditional or literary sources, and much of the romantic melancholy of his earlier poems from Senancour's "Obermann".

Matthew Arnold's writing on education has not drawn a significant critical endeavour separable from the criticism of his social writings.

Criticism began to take first place in Matthew Arnold's writing with his appointment in 1857 to the professorship of poetry at Oxford, which he held for two successive terms of five years.

Matthew Arnold is famous for introducing a methodology of literary criticism somewhere between the historicist approach common to many critics at the time and the personal essay; he often moved quickly and easily from literary subjects to political and social issues.

In one of his most famous essays on the topic, "The Study of Poetry", Matthew Arnold wrote that, "Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry".

Matthew Arnold considered the most important criteria used to judge the value of a poem were "high truth" and "high seriousness".

Further, Matthew Arnold thought the works that had been proven to possess both "high truth" and "high seriousness", such as those of Shakespeare and Milton, could be used as a basis of comparison to determine the merit of other works of poetry.

Matthew Arnold was led on from literary criticism to a more general critique of the spirit of his age.

Liberal education was essential, and by that Matthew Arnold meant a close reading and attachment to the cultural classics, coupled with critical reflection.

In 1887, Matthew Arnold was credited with coining the phrase "New Journalism", a term that went on to define an entire genre of newspaper history, particularly Lord Northcliffe's turn-of-the-century press empire.

Matthew Arnold had enjoyed a long and mutually beneficial association with the Pall Mall Gazette since its inception in 1865.

Matthew Arnold was appalled at the shamelessness of the sensationalistic new journalism of the sort he witnessed on his tour the United States in 1886.

Scholars of Matthew Arnold's works disagree on the nature of Matthew Arnold's personal religious beliefs.

Under the influence of Baruch Spinoza and his father, Dr Thomas Matthew Arnold, he rejected the supernatural elements in religion, even while retaining a fascination for church rituals.

Matthew Arnold is, at his best, a very good, but highly derivative poet, unlike Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, Swinburne and Rossetti, all of whom individualized their voices.